You are a memory, I am your shadow

Saturday 23 September 2023
 – Wednesday 4 October 2023
  • Archive
  • Reid Gallery

You are a memory, I am your shadow
23 September – 4 October 2023

Dreams are borne in the inbetweenness of reality and irreality; on the periphery of sleep and wakefulness; along the spectral seam between remembering and forgetting; on the margins that define landscapes and territories, integrating the personal with the political. Dreaming becomes a space in time, contained within the body and its ambit of consciousness. Dreaming is a consequence of pasts that cannot return but that which still haunt; effected by hopes that are yet to arrive; wherein the body grapples in the ephemeral passage of the present, and traverses undefined, surreal realms. Dreaming becomes a resounding memory of warped, overlapping timelines; and the body a shadow, manifesting these memories.

You are a memory, I am your shadow is curated by Shalmali Shetty and features work by Mele Broomes, Ashanti Harris, Asuf Ishaq, Michael Mersinis and Nadia Zhaya & Arthur Start. Showcasing a series of films, photographs, objects, an installation, and marked by two performances, the exhibition invites viewers to contemplate and dream, both individually and collectively.

Mele Broomes’ work embodies stories from the collective voice, creating visceral and sensory collaborations. Her work GRIN was presented at Battersea Art Centre, London, alongside the film production which was also screened at Theatre Centre Canada as part of Cultura Inglesa Festival in Brazil. In 2021 she was commissioned by Scottish Dance Theatre, where she created Amethyst, a theatre production and digital publication. Broomes was co-founder and co-director of Project X Dance (2017-2021), an organisation that champions dance and performance within the African and Caribbean Diaspora in Scotland. She is currently the founder and director of Body Remedy (2020), a [forming] ecology that centres on physical practice for self-recovery for black people and people of colour (BPOC).

Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and lecturer. Working with dance, performance, facilitation, sound, installation and writing, Harris’ work disrupts historical narratives and reimagines them from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. Recent commissions and exhibitions include: A Carnival of Overlapping Histories, Platform, Glasgow (2023); Black Gold, Fringe of Colour Film Festival, Edinburgh (2023); Jerwood Staging Series 2022, Jerwood Arts, London (2022); Dancing a Peripheral Quadrille, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh (2022); An Exercise in Exorcism, GoMA, Glasgow (2021); Opening Night, Timehri Film Festival, Georgetown (2021); JUMBIES, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2021); This Woman’s Work, Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami (2021); Miraculous Noise, Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg (2021); OHCE, Radiophrenia, 87.9FM (2020); Being Present, OGR, Torino (2020); In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2020).

Asuf Ishaq grew up in Birmingham and now works between Birmingham and London. Ishaq studied MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art. His recent exhibitions and awards include Articles of Home, solo exhibition at Reid Gallery, GSA Exhibitions, Glasgow (2023); Not to be a Singular Being, Chisenhale Art Place Studio, London (2022); The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Image Behaviour, ICA London (2022); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2022); Groundings Film Screening, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2021); and Inside the Country of the Skin, solo exhibition at Stryx Gallery, Birmingham (2021).

Michael Mersinis is an artist from Greece. Mersinis studied Political Sciences and philosophy in Germany, Applied Photography and Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art. He has been teaching in the Fine Art Photography Department since 2009 and led the MLitt in Photography and the Moving Image until 2016. He is a member of the Reading Landscape Research Group at the GSA, the RSE and the RSA. Mersinis’ practice and research is centred around the questioning of the Photographic Image, the notion of the place and the Image as Evental Site and the transliteration that occurs in the process of the photograph. Current projects include a long project on the history, locality and imagination of fundamental typologies of place that are historically present and liminal and the pursuit of a political identity in the contemporary image, a series of works that consider the locality and historical, geographical and cultural significance of site both real and imaginary.

Nadia Zhaya (b. Moscow, Russia) is an intermedia artist working in 3-dimensional art, kinetic sculpture, immersive spatial and site-specific installation. Through the use of primeval forces of fire, light and drive, the artist explores the universal and inexhaustible realm of spiritual and physical energy. As an international artist, Zhaya often makes art celebrating the depth and beauty of the common ground. Inspired by the casually transcendental and timeless, Zhaya creates objects and installations as mesmerising and empowering experiences. Keen on making visual art a visceral and charged experience for audiences of all backgrounds, Zhaya creates atmospheric and engaging artworks incorporating kinetic or digital motion. Zhaya holds a BA in Fine Art Sculpture and Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art.

Arthur Start is an experimental musician currently composing physical-simulation-based sounds as Duskaz Wandilaz, using Supercollider, Python, analog electronics, guitar, and field recordings. With an abstract sense of beauty and abhorrence for convention, these experiments become highly conceptual, drawing from geometry, tree growth, flocking behaviour, meta-art, exoplanetary climate change, and generative language models. Sonically he is into distorted, diminished, nonlinear sounds, layered into thick textural tapestries. Arthur has played sporadically in several bands. With Jeramesa, on bass and baritone guitar, he played psychedelic structured jams around Oxford, culminating in an opening set for Sun Ra Arkestra. Duskaz Wandilaz has published an ambisonic exoplanetary drone EP ‘Kepler 90’, and an album of generative experiments ‘Machine Art’.

Shalmali Shetty is a curator, artist and writer working between the UK and India. Her research interests include themes of archives, memories, hauntology, oral histories, and speculative ideas around prophecies, oracles and imagined futures, extending this focus through the familiar framework of India, the Global South and its neo-colonial relationship to the West. She intends to coalesce her backgrounds in art practice and theory in the production of the curatorial. Shetty graduated with an MLitt in Curatorial Practice from the Glasgow School of Art (2020) supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship. She is a recent recipient of the VACMA Award, Glasgow (2022); the Skinny x Edinburgh Art Festival Emerging Writer Programme, Edinburgh (2023); and the Art South Asia Project x Serendipity Arts Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship, UK and India (2023).

This exhibition is supported by The Glasgow School of Art as part of the School’s commitment to supporting 2020 graduates with physical shows once COVID restrictions allowed.

View Exhibition Documentation Here